The Informational Basis of the Theory of Fair Allocation

The theory of fair allocation is often favourably contrasted with the social choice theory in the search for escape routes from Arrow's impossibility theorem. Its success is commonly attributed to the fact that it is modest in its goal vis-a-vis social choice theory, since it does not aspire for a full-fledged ordering of options, and settles with a subset of "fair" options. We show that its success may rather be attributable to a broadened informational basis thereof. To substantiate this claim, we compare the informational basis of the theory of fair allocation with the informational requirements of social choice theory.